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A comparison of car regulations vs gun regulations

Posted by Scott Tribe on December 16, 2012, at 11:14 am |

I saw this on Facebook from a friend:

It was made by the “Occupy” movement in the US, and obviously is most relevant to them, but with what has been going on up here in Canada of late with a pro-gun /anti-gun regulation Conservative government, and their actions/attempts/considerations at weakening gun control laws and/or gun regulations, I thought it would be good to see the comparisons, to see where Canada currently stacks up.

If anyone honestly can argue that the regulations on the right that the Occupy folks would like to see on guns isn’t reasonable, be it in the US or Canada, I’d like to see the argument.

4 comments to A comparison of car regulations vs gun regulations

I agree common sense gun regulations are needed but gun registry or not Canada’s gun laws are far tougher than the US. I was looking on wikipedia at other countries gun laws and found ours were more lax than the United Kingdom (which is probably the toughest in the developed world), Australia, and Germany; while about the same as France, Sweden, and Italy. By the same token we are tougher than Finland and Switzerland. In terms of murder rates, asides from Japan and the US, pretty much every country fell between 0.5 to 2.0 (Canada was at 1.6 so a bit on the high side, but still relatively close and also I excluded the micro countries is in some like Liechtenstein 1 murder put it at 2.8 while Monaco was 0.0 due to no murders and both have around 30,000 people). Japan’s gun laws are no tougher than Britain so there extremely low murder rate is probably more cultural than anything. The Japanese place a high value on honour and politeness so I don’t think it is feasilbe to get our murder rate down to their levels. On the other hand the US was 4.2, which was lower than most developing countries, but by far the highest in the developed world. So my point is tougher gun laws in the US would definitely lower murder rates, but in Canada the change would probably be minimal as our murder rate are already very low to begin with. Yes some Conservatives do want American style gun laws, but Stephen Harper has never seemed as the most pro-gun of them. He did after all vote in favour of the gun registry in 1995 (he was one of three Reform MPs along with Jim Silye and Ted White who interestingly enough were both from Europe which don’t have a strong gun culture). The gun registry itself was not bad, but it was extremely ineffective, costly, and poorly run. Since it didn’t seem to have that big impact when you look at how much our murder rates fell relative to other developed countries (all of them went down by around 30% over the last 20 years), it rarely came down to whether it was well run or not. Had it been well-run I would have supported it, but since it wasn’t I didn’t. If Quebec can implement one that is well-run, then I would be for bringing it back.